The Rule of Lies
The Rule of Lies
Hannah Arendt | Dockworker Strike | Factoids | Elsewhere and Elsewhen
This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want.
| Hannah Arendt
Dockworker Strike
In Beneath the Potential Strike at U.S. Ports: Tensions Over Innovation - The New York Times, Peter Goodman does mid job laying out the looming dockworkers strike across the East and Gulf Coasts of the US.
He starts by identifying the core tension between port operators -- the front men for those shipping goods -- and the dockworkers. As usual, the port operators start with the advantage of 'owning' the ports, which in a democratic society should be seen as a common good managed for the benefit of the country. From a capitalist perspective, the port operators are justified in seeking to pay dockworkers as little as possible. From a unionist perspective, the dockworkers are justified in trying to get as much as they can in pay, benefits, and safety measures.
And in this fraught negotiation, automation is a wild card. Goodman tees that up:
Confronted by the militancy of longshore unions, port operators have deployed automation, in part to limit their vulnerability to labor troubles. Not coincidentally, dockworkers tend to look suspiciously at robots and other forms of innovation, divining threats to their livelihoods.
[…]
That, in a nutshell, is the history of labor relations on docks from Australia to Britain. And that dynamic is at the center of a contractual impasse now threatening to produce a debilitating strike starting Tuesday at ports on the East and Gulf Coasts of the United States.
The rise of shipping containers in the 1950s -- which simplified and sped up loading and unloading of cargo -- is the validation of dockworkers fears about automation cutting the number of jobs.
Goldman, again:
Among the key issues holding up a new contract, [while the existing contract]
whichexpires on Monday, is disagreement over the pace and scope of automation.[…]
Most industry experts view automation as both inevitable and positive.
So here Goodman has a chance to explore the larger issue of automation across the economy generally, or he can limit his perspective to just this dockworker strike. In the latter case, the dockworkers can be characterized as 'blocking innovation', not as the group being threatened by unchecked automation. But he’s taking door number two. He frames the challenges ahead as job retraining for the dock workers, instead of a negotiated adoption over time, which is the unionists’ desired end game.
President Biden’s administration is resisting pressure -- so far -- from business groups asking him to employ the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 to open a 90-day 'cooling off' period before a strike could be held, which would commence after the election. But this could alienate union members, a constituency he has worked hard to hold close.
In 2022,
Mr. Biden accused shipping carriers of contributing to inflation, calling them out for having “raised prices by as much as 1,000 percent” and making record profits.
Between April and June, container shipping carriers took in more than $10 billion in profits, nearly doubling those of the previous three months.
Going to be hard to plead poverty. Of course, those are the shipping companies, not the port operators. But it's probably a good proxy for increases in top- and rottom-line for port operators. Goldman’s blurring of shippers and port operators doesn't help his storytelling.
Goodman reports that the dockworkers 'are asserting claims on a share of the gains', but he never summarizes their demands, or the points of disagreement with the port operators. So I had to go looking elsewhere for more deets.
From ABC news:
The International Longshoremen's Association is demanding significantly higher wages and a total ban on the automation of cranes, gates and container-moving trucks that are used in the loading or unloading of freight at 36 U.S. ports. Those ports handle roughly half of the nations' cargo from ships.
I can see no one advocating a middle course, not even the White House. The media seems to have embraced the 'inevitable and positive' mantra.
From The Guardian:
JP Morgan analysts have estimated a strike could cost the US economy $5bn per day. A one-day strike backlog could take an estimated four to six days to clear, according to analysts at Sea-Intelligence, a shipping advisory firm.
$5B a day is a lot of money.
Bargaining between the two sides came to a halt in June after the union accused the USMX of violating the current contract by implementing the use of automation at ports, including in Mobile, Alabama. ILA leaders claimed the technology, an auto-gate system used to automate the processing of trucks into ports, was being used to replace union labor.
The union says it has been in contact with the USMX several times in recent weeks, but that the USMX has so far declined to increase its offer on pay.
The ILA is demanding significant wage increases, healthcare improvements, and no automated terminals or semi-automated terminals at the ports. For years, labor unions representing US port workers have criticized automation for resulting in significant job losses, while shipping corporation profits soared.[…]
The union has pushed back on USMX claims about its wage demands, arguing a $5-an-hour wage increase for each year of the six-year contract is only a 9.98% annual increase. It has also alluded to garnering international support if workers do walk out on strike.
The economy is getting much better, but prices are still quite high compared to six years ago when the last union contract was signed, and in the intervening years the dockworkers saw only a $1/hour pay increase in each of those six years.
My hope is that a middle ground can be found, with a step up in pay and an agreed upon transition to automation in areas where there are jobs that are too dangerous or simply impossible for people to perform without automation. But an unregulated, unilateral push to automate everything as fast as possible — which would be the port operators (and shippers) wet dream — should be blocked.
This is one sharp edge of the push toward automation in logistics, manufacturing, and other sectors. It we want to avert the rapid loss of middle class jobs, we will have to slow this transition down to human — societal — speed. We have to move slowly enough that we don’t leave generations of workers behind.
Who is making that argument, aside from me?
Factoids
Cutting back on food waste isn’t easy.
In Massachusetts, a ban started in 2014 led to a 7% average annual reduction in total landfilled and incinerated waste in its first five years of implementation, according to the study. By contrast, bans in California (started in 2016), Connecticut (2014), Rhode Island (2016) and Vermont (2014) did not meaningfully reduce landfill waste. Programs in New Jersey (2021), New York (2022), Maryland (2023) and Washington (2024) proved too new to evaluate.
The researchers identified three likely reasons for Massachusetts’ success. Of the states evaluated, it has the highest density of food waste processing facilities. It also used the simplest language in its program, with the fewest exemptions. Lastly, Massachusetts focused on enforcement: Where inspections or fines were rare in other states studied, its number of inspections per generator per year was 216% higher than the next highest state, Vermont.
A general lesson: you make something illegal, you have to enforce the law or people won’t comply, especially if it costs them money.
…
Workation types.
Of the workers that work to some degree of their vacation, they are 2.3x more likely than their peers to have also taken secret vacation days, suggesting that quiet vacations may be an effort by overworked employees to regain some work-life balance.
The data also identified three employee groups:
29% are Planned Workationers. This group plans to work while on vacation. They take their devices with them and keep their notifications switched on.
43% are Unplanned Workationers. They intend to switch off but end up getting sucked in to work regardless. They leave devices behind, switch off notifications, but still respond to messages from their manager and coworkers and check in regularly, most likely from their personal devices.
28% are True Vacationers. This group successfully disconnects. They leave their devices behind, switch off notifications and don’t respond to messages.
I am a True Workationer: a group not mentioned above. I plan to work (some) on vacation, but I limit the hours I work, and I turn notifications off when not working. Of course, I am self-employed, so I don’t have the pressures that others do.
…
College-educated voters are from Mars.
Across more than 50 policy questions posed in one of the largest and most comprehensive surveys of public opinion, voters with college degrees are the only group to offer ideologically consistent answers most of the time. Most voters are heterodox; only college-educated voters are not. Under their influence, Democrats are too easily caricatured as the party of an out-of-touch, no-fun elite that demands fidelity to ideology in a way that most voters don’t connect with.
I am too fun! (Are not!) Am too! (Are not!)…
Elsewhere
Andrew Curry writes a wonderful newsletter, Just Two Things, and I’ve reread one issue several times in the past month. In the second part of that issue, Curry reviews a ten-year old book on strategy, Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy Bad Strategy, which as Curry puts it is ‘one of the few books on strategy worth reading’.
I’ll start with the bottom line first, Rumelt’s condensation of good strategy:
Despite the roar of voices equating strategy with ambition, leadership, vision, or planning, strategy is none of these. Rather, it is coherent action backed by an argument. And the core of the strategist’s work is always the same: discover the crucial factors in a situation and design a way to coordinate and focus actions to deal with them.
Curry approaches his analysis in more of a top-down fashion, detailing the various elements of Rumelt’s approach. It’s a good read.
In 2023, I read an essay by Rumelt and was inspired to write the following, on the Sunsama blog.
…
Elsewhen
Good Strategy… And Bad | Stowe Boyd (2023)
How is it that some organizations cut through the fog of competition and achieve their goals, while most stumble?
I have been in a wide variety of settings — in business, non-profits, and government — where I could tell that our attempts at setting strategic direction were floundering. These situations seemed to have some common issues, but they didn’t seem to be caused by the exact same problems. Many have noted that “history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”
In several instances, the group involved with choosing between various alternatives could not come to a clear decision and simply collected all the options into one bloated, self-contradictory mess, leading to a corresponding operational meltdown. In other cases, I believed that instead of strategy driven by a deep appreciation of the actual challenges the organization faced, the group fell back on platitudes and buzzwords in place of a trajectory based on the specifics confronting the organization. (I have on occasion been fired as an advisor because I couldn’t stop fighting against what I thought was terrible strategic analysis.)
One element that I think was missing in these settings was the lack of two things: an understanding of what a good strategy is, and a lack of compelling stories to help groups struggling with defining one to ground the discussions in human terms.
I was reminded of these ideas in an essay by Richard Rumelt, which opens with the story of Horatio Nelson, the admiral of the British fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar during the Napoleonic wars.
The prevailing tactics in 1805 were for the two opposing fleets to stay in line, firing broadsides at each other. But Nelson had a strategic insight into how to deal with being outnumbered. He broke the British fleet into two columns and drove them at the Franco-Spanish fleet, hitting its line perpendicularly. The lead British ships took a great risk, but Nelson judged that the less-trained Franco-Spanish gunners would not be able to compensate for the heavy swell that day and that the enemy fleet, with its coherence lost, would be no match for the more experienced British captains and gunners in the ensuing melee. He was proved right: the French and Spanish lost 22 ships, two-thirds of their fleet. The British lost none.
As Rumelt summarizes, Nelson’s brilliant victory was not driven by listening to the opinion of his many captains, his charisma, or even the prowess of his fleet: “A good strategy does more than urge us forward toward a goal or vision; it honestly acknowledges the challenges we face and provides an approach to overcoming them”.
Rumelt goes on to provide a number of other illustrations of companies developing bad and good strategies, like the failures of International Harvester and Digital Equipment Corporation, and the brilliant market turnaround of Nvidia, whose CEO Jen-Hsun Huang took a very Nelson-like turn by upping the company’s release cadence to 6 months from the industry standard 18-months, and soon leading to Intel leaving the market and market leader 3Dfx falling into bankruptcy a decade later.
And so, looking back over the many settings where I was in a meeting, arguing about the way forward for that organization, I wish I had gained the insight offered through these stories and Rumelt’s condensation of good strategy:
Despite the roar of voices equating strategy with ambition, leadership, vision, or planning, strategy is none of these. Rather, it is coherent action backed by an argument. And the core of the strategist’s work is always the same: discover the crucial factors in a situation and design a way to coordinate and focus actions to deal with them.
Each of these steps is difficult, and must be linked tightly: make a clear and unambiguous diagnosis of the challenge, set a guiding policy to overcome the obstacles laid out in the diagnosis, and take steps — closely coordinated with each other — to accomplish the policy. Note that the innovation animating these visionaries wasn’t motivated by the desire to break rules, but by an appreciation of the situation that confronted them.
These are the elements of strategy that rhyme across the stories of Trafalgar and Nvidia, and many others. And their absence is the subtext of all the bad strategies that sadly animate so many strategic failures.
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